Calling from a taxi

Have you ever been in the back of a taxi cab and needed to make an important call only to find you have left your mobile phone at home or your battery is flat?

Well if you happen to be in London or Birmingham city centre and you're lucky enough to hail one of the 100 O2 branded black cabs kitted out with an O2 Taxi-phone in addition to charging units compatible with most O2 phones.

Taximedia was commissioned by O2 to develop the advertising using their 'supersides' product which sees the cab beautifully painted with company branding.

Taximedia approached KeyMT one of Europe's biggest and most respected muti-media specialist to develop the hardware required to support the PR campaign.

In turn KeyMT came to Buff to design and develop the integration of the Motorola car phone electronics into the taxi interior.

With a lead time of one week and a budget of just £100 per taxi, Buff really had their work cut out and pulled out all the stops in order to meet the very tight deadline.

Buff sent a section of the cab interior trim to Arrk France to be scanned, generating point cloud data as a reference surface allowing the phone fascia to fit snugly against the trim. Whilst the Motorola electronics where reverse engineered by Buff.

A new fascia, and new keypad silicone membrane where designed to reflect the O2 logo and the back light illumination LED's where changed from green to blue to match in with O2 branding.

The 3D CAD files where sent to Arrk's UK rapid prototype facility to test out the fit and function of the proposal before silicone tooling was produced to vacuum cast the 100 fascias.

Delivered on time and on budget Buff are proud to have been associated with KeyMT and the O2 'Cab Phone'